


Apotheosis

by coffeesuperhero



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Gen, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-14
Updated: 2011-12-14
Packaged: 2017-10-27 09:16:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/294139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeesuperhero/pseuds/coffeesuperhero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU post-<i>Sacrifice</i>. Billy lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Apotheosis

**Author's Note:**

> **Summary:** AU post- _Sacrifice_. Billy lives.  
>  **Disclaimers:** This isn't for profit, just for fun. All characters  & situations belong to RDM, David Eick, Sci-Fi, NBC Universal and their various subsidiaries.  
>  **A/N:** Spoilers through the end, just in case. **Warnings for MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH, some talk of gun violence.**

He sits in a chair on the deck during the ceremony, listening to the eulogies, the songs, the echoing cries of, "So say we all," and all the while, Laura sits next to him and squeezes his hand like she wants to reassure herself that he is still alive, that this is not his funeral, too. He wants to feel grateful for the comfort, but for weeks now all he's felt is strange, numb, frozen. Where there should be warmth and life, instead there is only the chill of death around his heart, like a cold dark expanse of space spreading out within him, an airlock instead of a heart.

Cottle hadn't wanted to release him for the ceremony, but he insisted, though he imagines it was Laura's persistence and not his own that tipped the scales.

It was important for him to be here. He doesn't really know why. There are still long moments of a day where he has to remind himself that he is alive, but his life is odd, unnatural. He shouldn't be here. The woman in the hospital bed next to him said that the gods play dice with their lives. He's never been a believer in any of that; he's always just believed in people. Now, though, when the nights are long and quiet and he has nothing to hold onto but the persistent noise of the machines monitoring his vital signs, he finds it easier to believe in uncaring deities. Perhaps one of them, in a fit of cavalier caprice, exchanged his life for the life of the man in the casket in front of him, trading one life for another like they are nothing more than gamepieces. He needed to be here to know if that was true.

Of course, there are no gods to be seen here. There are only broken people.

There's a prayer, and then another. It's out of place when the deceased was an atheist, but people need to grieve, and perhaps now more than ever they need the blessed balm of the afterlife to pull them from their bunks every day. He wonders if there was ever a time when Lee considered the Elysian Fields a requisite nepenthe, a soothing elixir for the ills of the world. If the Fields exist, he isn't sure he wants to go to them.

He has been informed that many people feel anger at the gods in the aftermath of violence. Many people stop believing. He doesn't believe, but he's still angry at gods he doesn't believe in. More than anything, he believes their lives don't matter. A bullet doesn't discriminate between good men and bad, those that say their prayers and those that curse the heavens. Why should the gods, if gods there are?

Beside him, Laura murmurs part of a prayer along with the others, and then the Marines stand to do their part in the service. It's a military funeral, but there's no twenty-one gun salute here on Galactica, not during wartime: it would be a waste of ammunition, but then, it was a waste of a life, so maybe it would have been appropriate after all.

Someone calls for a moment of silence to honor their fallen comrade, and he grimaces. He would have preferred the shock and jolt of the gunshots. At least when there's noise, he knows he's alive. But when the stillness descends over the deck, the seconds of silence stretching out before him, he forgets that his eyes are open, that his lungs are pulling oxygen in and out and in and out. It's the same horrible oblivion that overtakes him at night when he should be sleeping.

He can feel his heart thumping, pushing wave after rhythmic wave of its icy moribund air against his ribs. He counts the beats; he tells himself they're saying, "You lived. You lived. You lived." If he repeats it enough, surely it will be true.

The truth is cold, just like his airlock heart. The truth is that his heart stopped for sixty seconds.

Lee's stopped forever.

\+ + + +

He can't look the Admiral in the eyes anymore. In truth, he had never really cared for Lee, even before he realized that the woman he loved had given her heart to Apollo, but Bill Adama has lost more than he can countenance, and when those accusing blue eyes meet his, he knows they wish they were looking at someone else.

He wants to tell him that sometimes, he wishes the same. He wishes Bill could have his son, his Apollo, the Golden Boy with the perfect callsign for the perfect pilot. Lee was always the Golden Boy, the God of the Sun, outshining every other man in every room he ever entered. Even in death, Billy stands in his shadow.

The Office of the President awards Leland Joseph Adama a posthumous medal for his bravery, and though Billy writes the words that Laura says when she addresses the press, her voice rich with emotion, Lee is the only one anyone can talk about. Lee has exchanged the brilliant light of the sun for the burnished glow of a halo, and all Billy can do when he has to walk the halls of Galactica is try not to close his eyes against the glare of another man's memory.

\+ + + +

Time heals nothing, and certainly not these wounds, but he learns to sort and file his grief, classifying it like he would Laura's papers. The guilt goes under I, for _I Should Have Died_.

Every night, he dreams that he died. He wakes up screaming, but there's no noise: his shouts are soundless, like the grave he should have filled has swallowed his voice instead of his body.

He avoids sleep as much as possible. After hours on his feet in the office, he used to greet sleep like an old friend, but now the still of the silence is a waking nightmare even before he passes into fitful unconsciousness, and he takes on as many projects as he can to keep himself away from his bed until he can physically take no more.

He leaves the lights on; he plays the wireless. It doesn't help. There is nothing he can do to shake the feeling that he should not have lived. The incessant taunting voice of fate plagues his conscious thoughts, constantly whispering its whys and what-ifs into the quiet of his dark corner of Colonial One.

 _Why did he live? Why did Lee die? What if he hadn't?_

His dreams of death are self-important nightmares of a future irreparably altered by the absence of one person. Laura steals an election but she loses anyway. Baltar leads them into a brave new world, and they settle on a worthless ball of dirt, just to be able to say they have their feet on solid ground once again. The Cylons come; more people die. Everyone dies. Everyone always dies.

He gives up sleeping for the night and settles in to read instead. The Colonial Fleet News Service has just done a special issue on Lee Adama, the man who died so hostages could live. It's a good profile piece. He hates that. He hates Lee, though it's hard to say whether he hates him more for the way he lived or the way he died.

Either way, the words that have been festering underneath all the guilt and the pain finally crawl out of his mouth. They don't make him feel better, but neither do they make him feel worse.

"I hate you," he says, staring at Lee's photograph.

"I don't blame you," someone says, and his eyes slowly focus on the too-solid figure of Lee Adama, sitting casually across from him in Billy's desk chair.

"What?" Billy says, as much a question to the universe as anything. He is not addressing an hallucination as though it might answer, and yet, even as he swears to himself that he isn't, he finds himself awaiting a reply.

Lee shrugs. "I hated myself a lot of the time. So like I said. I don't blame you."

"You're dead," Billy points out.

"That's the rumor," Lee acknowledges. He reaches over and picks up the newspaper, studying the article memorializing his life. "I never liked this picture."

Billy doesn't respond immediately. First, he stands, tugs open the door, and wanders the ship until he finds someone else who's awake. He nods a casual good evening to the first yawning junior staffer he encounters, who smiles thinly and says, "Shouldn't you be asleep, sir?"

"No rest for the weary," he says, and she shrugs and walks on.

He takes this brief conversation as confirmation that he hasn't finally slipped away from life, that whatever the vision in his room it, it is something he is living through.

He wonders, though, as he wanders back, when he became a _sir_.

He returns to his room; Lee is still sitting there.

"Okay, apparently I'm still alive," Billy says, shutting the door. "But you're not. How are you here?"

"Well, I've risen from the dead. Maybe we should ask a priest," Lee jokes. He gestures around the room. "You probably don't know any. No altar, no icons, no images of the gods in your room."

"I don't believe in them," Billy says automatically.

"I don't either," Lee says. He leans back in the chair. "Either they believe in me, or death isn't as permanent as we've always thought it was."

"That's a logical fallacy," Billy says. He sounds like a parrot, repeating lines from his old logic courses.

Lee raises an amused eyebrow. "You're right. We should explore all the possibilities here. Like, for example: I'm all in your head."

"If I was going to hallucinate someone, it could have at least been someone I like, godsdammit," Billy swears, sinking down onto his bed. "Why not my mother, or my sister? My best friend on Caprica?"

"Maybe we're being punished for being atheists. Or, more likely, the gods are real and they hate both of us. This is no stroll in the plaza for me, either, Keikaya." He stops talking and squints at Billy. "That _is_ your name, isn't it?"

"You're haunting me, here," Billy says, irritated more than he wants to be that he's talking to a dead person who couldn't even be bothered to learn his surname before showing up to rattle chains or whatever it is that ghosts actually do. "Did that not come with your assignment?"

Lee frowns. "It wasn't really an assignment. Anyway, if I'm just in your head, maybe it's not my fault that I don't know your name. Maybe you didn't want me to. Maybe you feel guilty about my death and you don't think you deserve it."

Billy resists the urge to try and smother himself with his pillow. "Great. This is frakking wonderful. Everyone I know is dead, the woman I work for has decided she's the fulfillment of some wild religious prophecy from centuries ago, I got shot, I lost my girlfriend, and the dead guy she left me for is in my room, fauxlosiphizing and psychoanalyzing me while I try to get some frakking sleep."

"You weren't getting any sleep anyway," Lee reminds him, and Billy really wants to punch the smarmy look off his face. He wonders if that's even a thing he can do. He hurls a pillow at Lee as an experiment, and Lee catches it before it hits him in the face. "Feel better?"

"Not really," Billy grumbles, and settles back into bed. "If you're going to be here, at least make yourself useful. Read me those papers on the desk, or make some noise, or _something_. I hate the quiet."

"Yeah? You should try being dead," Lee says, but he picks up the paper and begins to read, and finally, Billy sleeps.

Maybe this is a punishment from vindictive gods, but it's the best night's sleep he's had in a long time.

\+ + + +

Finally, it happens: he runs into Dee in the halls of Galactica. They both see each other, meet each other's eyes, leaving both of them with no excuse not to at least nod a casual hello.

She asks how he is; she tells him that it's good to see him. He doesn't contradict her.

They make small talk. He does the polite thing and inquires about her well-being, as she had about his. Dee does not apologize, but why should she? He doesn't expect it of her, and he's oddly glad that she doesn't try to lie. Perhaps it's just the hollow ache in the center of his chest that forbids him to feel anything for her; perhaps that is one wound that has healed.

"I guess she did save your marriage," Lee tells him, and Billy rolls his eyes.

"Shut the frak up," Billy mumbles, and Dee's eyes widen. He runs a hand through his hair, frustrated. "Not you, I-- not you, sorry, it's been a long day."

"Maybe we should talk when you've had some sleep," she says slowly.

"That's not likely to happen, is it," says Lee's voice in his ear, but Billy's ready for him, this time.

"Sure," he tells her, and she reaches out for him, squeezing his arm lightly before she walks away.

Her hand on his arm is comforting, but not in the way it used to be. If things were different, the concern in her voice and the soft touch of her palm against his shoulder might have given him hope for some kind of reconciliation, but that is not this story, he knows. Even if she genuinely wished to be with him, he wouldn't wish himself on her, not now. She deserves better than a walking corpse for a lover, especially one who has frequent conversations with a dead man.

"Gods, you're a miserable jackass, Apollo," Billy says, and Lee has the temerity to smile.

"Death is pretty frakking liberating, Keikaya," Lee says. They stop by his picture on the Memorial Wall. "But I think I was always a miserable jackass."

"And what, you needed to come back from the dead so someone could confirm your suspicions? Congratulations. You are now and always were a miserable jackass."

"Maybe I had a few reasons to be," Lee suggests, tapping his picture. "Maybe it was just evasive maneuvers."

Billy studies the photograph for a few minutes, contemplating the possibility. "From what?"

"Shitty childhood, dead brother, unrequited love of said brother's fiancée," Lee says, ticking points off like he's reading a grocery list. He taps his chest, right where the bullet went in, and shrugs. "Not bulletproof excuses, of course."

"Gods, of all the ghosts, I got the one that makes puns," Billy grouses. He crosses his arms over his chest. "And stop making me feel sorry for you."

"I can't make you feel anything, Keikaya," Lee laughs. "But you do feel, don't you? You were glad. Some small part of you was glad, that you lived and I died. That's why you hate seeing the Old Man, that's why you avoid Galactica. I breathed my last and you didn't and you felt _happy_ about it."

"Yes! Is that what you want to hear? Yes! I was glad you frakking died!" Billy shouts, realizing all too late who he is and where he's standing, here, on Galactica, in front of the frakking Memorial Wall, declaring that he's glad to be living while Lee Adama is not.

The dreadful silence that falls over the corridor is oppressive, almost hostile. He doesn't remember navigating his way back to the Raptor that takes him to Colonial One, but he's very glad to sink into the quiet chatter of the staffroom.

\+ + + +

Lee disappears for awhile after the incident in front of the Memorial Wall. Billy submits hopeful petitions to gods he doesn't even believe in that his ghostly visitor is gone for good.

Laura makes him take a week off after The Incident. You can't insult the memory of Galactica's favorite fallen son without a few repercussions. She asks him what the hell he was thinking, and he doesn't know what to say. There's very little he can offer in response: _I was having a conversation with a dead man_ probably won't go over very well.

He settles for half-hearted apology followed quickly by, "You don't know what this is like for me," which makes the hard lines of her face soften.

"I'm not happy that anyone died," he explains. "But I'm out in the black here, Madam President, and sometimes I feel like it should have been me instead. I don't know why I'm still here when he isn't."

"I thank the gods every day that you are," she says, and he tries not to grimace. He knows from the look on her face that he hasn't quite managed. "Get some rest."

He doesn't, of course. Two days later, he's begging for something to do, just to stop the mad rush of thoughts, and Laura mercifully allows him back into the office.

Days pass in a steady marching stream. The other Colonial One staffers slowly forget to treat him with delicacy, and instead of awkward silences, the office fills up with noise. It's a godsdamned relief, really.

And then, of course, one sleepless night, Lee's voice interrupts his tortured thoughts as he lays there in the long quiet dark.

"Well, Keikaya, has your reputation survived your _unfortunate outburst_ on Galactica?"

"Welcome back," Billy says sarcastically. "And yes, no thanks to you."

Lee's voice is unapologetic. "I thought you'd feel better if you said it out loud."

"I'm only human," Billy sighs. He rolls over onto his side, squinting at Lee's apparition in the dim light. "Why were you even there that night, with her? You didn't love her. Did you?"

"I think I wanted to," Lee says thoughtfully, and Billy can think of nothing to say in response except, "I think I did, too."

  
\+ + + +

One of the Raptor pilots finds a planet. Laura insists that they press on, not settle, keep searching for a promised land bequeathed to them by a pantheon of gods and goddesses that he doesn't even believe are real. The closest he comes to believing in Apollo are the conversations he has with Lee, which are more frequent and less hostile, almost welcome. It would make more sense to him if Laura said, "Look, there's a dead person who hangs around my office and tells me that these things are good ideas," but she doesn't: she makes allusions to Pythia, trying to convince both of them that this path is the right one. He tries to understand Laura's insistence, her belief in this prophecy. He doesn't, but he does the work he needs to do, because after all of this, after everything they've been through, he still believes in Laura.

Lee's voice in his ear tells him that he doesn't, that he only wants to believe, the same way Laura wants to believe in the prophecy. With an almost familial affection, he tells Lee to shove it.

He does some digging of his own, almost literally: Billy finds a geologist on one of the civvie ships who gives speech after speech about the plate tectonics of the new planet and his fears that it will prove too unstable to sustain their new civilization.

Billy doesn't know if it's good science, but he knows a good argument when he hears one.

Laura wins the election, but Billy has had enough of the will of the gods to last him more than a lifetime.

"I'm sorry," he says, watching her read his resignation letter.

"Are you?" she asks. She tugs off her glasses and stares at him. From the corner behind her desk, Lee stares at him, too.

"Yes," he says, but for what, he does not say.

\+ + + +

He tries to avoid politics, but it's difficult to ignore the only thing that has gotten him out of bed every morning for the past several years, and when the Caprican Quorum seat stands open, he decides to try his hand at the legislative side of things. It's better than listening to people droning on and on in the bar of the _Rising Star_.

The night after he wins the seat, Bill Adama shows up unexpectedly in his small bunk.

"I want you to have these," he says, setting a large box of books on the table.

From the other side of the room, Lee laughs. "My grandfather's law books. Good job, kid."

Billy ignores him and raises an eyebrow at Bill. "Don't you mean, the President wanted me to have those?"

It isn't common knowledge that the Admiral and the President are involved in more than a professional capacity, so naturally, everyone in the Fleet suspects.

Bill tries to stare him down, but Billy stares right back, never blinking. He doesn't feel guilty anymore: a year of being haunted by Lee Adama has done him some measure of good in that regard.

"I told her this was a bad idea," Bill says. He looks away, towards the dark side of the room where Lee is sitting, and for a moment Billy wonders if Bill is haunted by memories too.

It has taken nearly a year for him to realize it, but what happened to Lee, no matter the momentary vengeful surge of angry relief he had felt at the time, was not his fault. Still, he has compassion for Bill, for his loss, and it resurfaces now as he watches Bill struggle to find something to say that isn't, "I wish you hadn't lived."

"Look, I-- thank you," Billy says finally, waving his hand at the box. "I know I'm not the person you wanted to give them to."

He pretends not to hear Lee's short bark of laughter.

"No," Bill replies. "But I think he would want you to have them."

He leaves, the door sliding quietly shut behind him.

"I wonder," Billy says to Lee, long after Bill has gone, "what you might have needed these for, if he'd had a chance to give them to you."

"When would I ever have had the time?" Lee asks. He taps his fingers on his grandfather's copy of _Law & Mind_.

"Some day we all should," Billy sighs, and cracks open the first book.

"First my books," Lee says, dropping into a chair opposite Billy. "What next, a call sign? Maybe something godly for you, too. What do you think of Hyperion?"

"Often mistaken for the sun, huh," Billy says, scribbling some notes in the margins of the books. "I think I'll pass."

"Suit yourself," Lee says.

\+ + + +

It happens during his first Quorum meeting. One of the representatives asks for legal points on some obscure program, and before she's even finished talking, he's passing notes around the conference table.

"Gods, Keikaya, you're like Hermes," she says, and he tries to play it off, but the nickname sticks: by the end of the meeting, almost everyone has used it.

"Well, well, well," Lee says, his hands in his pockets as he stands next to Billy, watching the other Quorum representatives mill around the room after the meeting breaks up. "Billy Hermes Keikaya. Looks like you got yourself a call sign after all."

"It's not a call sign," Billy says. He adjusts his tie; he runs a hand through his new haircut. It's shorter now, the overgrown curls a thing of the past.

Lee looks him over. "You know, we're not all that different, you and me. Maybe we never were."

"I'm a long way from the god of light," he replies.

"Are you sure?" Lee asks, but one of the representatives calls Billy over, and he doesn't have a chance to respond.

When he finally makes it back to his room at the end of a very long day, he pulls an old book off his shelf, one that Laura left for him, ages ago, when she was trying to make him understand why she needed the gods, or why they needed her. He flips it open to the pages about Hermes, running his fingers over the text until he finds what he's looking for.

 _The messenger of the gods, Hermes carried a golden staff which was given to him by Apollo._

"Pretend it's a torch," Lee's voice says. "I'm passing it."

\+ + + +

Time marches on, and so does he. Earth turns out to be an uninhabitable wasteland, but they've found something different, something green and wild and new, and they're giving it a shot.

Things have changed, and not least, his life: this morning he placed his hand on a scroll and promised to faithfully uphold the laws. His hands were shaking no less than Laura's had been when he watched her do the same.

He stands up from his desk, the cufflinks Laura had given him after the election clicking against the edge of the desk as he moves. They're small and gold, in the shape of wings, not unlike the pips military personnel receive.

"President Hermes isn't such a terrible name," she had said, pressing the box into his hands.

He wonders what Lee might have made of it, but he hasn't had a visit from his old friend in a long time. There are days when he can't decide if that's a change for the better.

An aide steps in for a moment and tells him it's time for the next round of meetings, and he nods and heads to the closet for a clean shirt. He looks in the mirror, just to see if he looks as tired as he feels, and immediately spins around, ready to demand an explanation, an excuse, for Lee's sudden reappearance, but there is no one: he is alone. His eyes survey his room, the new suits, the stacks of notes, the copy of Joseph Adama's _Law & Mind_ that rests on his shelf. Slowly, he turns back to his reflection in the mirror, realizing even before he meets his own eyes in the mirror that it was his own face, his own dark hair, his own jawline, that caught his eye. He adjusts the knot of his tie, feeling the steady rhythm of his heart as he smooths his hands over his collared shirt.

"You lived," he says, and turns off the light.


End file.
